Long Live the Queen of Christmas!

By Michael B. Stewart
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We all know that Beyoncé is the Queen B, but who is the Queen of Christmas? Recently, Mariah Carey set out to settle this question once and for all.

On March 10, 2021, she filed a U.S. trademark application attempting to claim trademark rights to “QUEEN OF CHRISTMAS” for a wide range of different goods and services including alcoholic beverages, online retail services, dog collars, musical recordings, body lotions, spa items, Christmas decorations, and even lactose-free milk.

After all, her 1994 song, “All I Want for Christmas is You” is the number-one best-selling Christmas digital single with more than 3.2 million downloads—twice the sales of the number-two song (“Do You Want to Build a Snowman”). It also has the most streams of a song in a day on Spotify (17.2 million).

Mariah Carey’s song has become a holiday staple, topping the charts in twenty-eight countries including Australia, Canada, France, and Germany. Amazingly, in 2019, 25 years after its release, “All I Want for Christmas is You” topped the United States Billboard’s Hot 100 music list for the first time, and has continued to peak at number one in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, (Top Selling Christmas Songs of All Time | by Sheldon Rocha Leal, PhD | Medium) thereby breaking several records, including the longest delay between a song’s release, and becoming the number one song. With estimated sales of over 16 million physical copies worldwide by 2014, “All I want for Christmas is You” is the best-selling holiday song by a female artist, and one of the best-selling physical singles in music history. Unsurprisingly, it is also at the top of the Christmas charts for digital downloads. Further, it is even the number one Christmas ringtone, although I suspect that may be too much Mariah Carey for some of us!

Under U.S. trademark law, once an application successfully completes a substantive examination process, which happened here, it is then published for opposition. Members of the public who disagree with registration of a mark have the opportunity to oppose the application. Elizabeth Chan did just that. A well-known full-time Christmas singer songwriter who herself has been referred to as the “Queen of Christmas” by multiple media, including in 2018 by the New Yorker magazine, Ms. Chan filed an opposition noting that several recording artists in addition to both her and Mariah Carey have also been dubbed the “Queen of Christmas”, including Darlene Love and Brenda Lee. As Ms. Chan noted, “Queen of Christmas” “is a perennial nickname that has been and will be continued to be bestowed on multiple future singers for decades to come.” In her filing before the Trademark Office, Ms. Chan also quoted directly from Ms. Carey, who stated that she does not even consider herself the Queen of Christmas. See ‘That title belongs to St. Mary’: Mariah Carey renounces ‘Queen of Christmas’ title as she believes the mother of Jesus is more deserving.

Perhaps agreeing that there may have been some overreach in seeking a broad range of exclusivity to the phrase “QUEEN OF CHRISTMAS,” Ms. Carey did not respond to the opposition, resulting in the abandonment of her U.S. trademark application in November. Looks like the world is big enough for more than a few Queens of Christmas.

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Michael Stewart is a founding member of Fishman Stewart. He has worked in a wide range of technical areas including information technology, e-commerce, telecommunications, and mechanical, aerospace, computer, and nuclear engineering. His practice includes domestic and foreign patent prosecution, e-commerce and information technology, patent opinions, intellectual property litigation, domestic and foreign trademark prosecution, trademark opinions, copyrights, trade secrets, rights of publicity, intellectual property evaluations/due diligence and drafting and negotiating technology and intellectual property agreements. Check out his full bio here.